Continuing its breakneck pace of user growth and scaling, Instagram announced on Thursday that the site had reached the 80 million user mark, a 60 percent increase in its community over the past 13 weeks.
“We now have >5.7m users per employee,†Instagram infrastructure engineer Rick Branson wrote in a tweet. If you do the math, that’s 14 employees. And there’s more to come: “We’re hiring
,†Branson added.
It’s a significant milestone for the company, which has only continued to gain traction over the past year. The company finally launched its Android application in April, and almost instantaneously gained millions of users. To date, those 80 million- plus users have shared more than 4 billion photos using the service.
There were concerns that Facebook’s announcement it would acquire Instagram for $1 billion would curtail the service’s growth; perhaps a Facebook-owned Instagram could screw up the already massively popular, simple service. Others worried that the addition of millions of Android users would muddy the quality of items shared; even Apple exec Phil Schiller stopped using the service after Android was added.
But the Facebook acquisition hasn’t gone through yet, still held up in review by the FTC. And growth obviously shows no signs of slowing.
Now, as Instagram continues to spread — with Open Graph integration making the app more visible within Facebook, as well as recent Foursquare integration — the challenge is continuing to scale. And as Branson’s tweet shows, CEO Kevin Systrom isn’t shy about picking up new talent before moving over to Facebook (if the acquisition goes through, that is).
The announcement comes on another momentous day: Facebook’s first earnings call. We’ll have to wait and see if the social giant has any input as to the status of the acquisition.
http://allthingsd.com/20120726/show...instagram-hits-80-million-users/?mod=atdtweet
“We now have >5.7m users per employee,†Instagram infrastructure engineer Rick Branson wrote in a tweet. If you do the math, that’s 14 employees. And there’s more to come: “We’re hiring
,†Branson added.It’s a significant milestone for the company, which has only continued to gain traction over the past year. The company finally launched its Android application in April, and almost instantaneously gained millions of users. To date, those 80 million- plus users have shared more than 4 billion photos using the service.
There were concerns that Facebook’s announcement it would acquire Instagram for $1 billion would curtail the service’s growth; perhaps a Facebook-owned Instagram could screw up the already massively popular, simple service. Others worried that the addition of millions of Android users would muddy the quality of items shared; even Apple exec Phil Schiller stopped using the service after Android was added.
But the Facebook acquisition hasn’t gone through yet, still held up in review by the FTC. And growth obviously shows no signs of slowing.
Now, as Instagram continues to spread — with Open Graph integration making the app more visible within Facebook, as well as recent Foursquare integration — the challenge is continuing to scale. And as Branson’s tweet shows, CEO Kevin Systrom isn’t shy about picking up new talent before moving over to Facebook (if the acquisition goes through, that is).
The announcement comes on another momentous day: Facebook’s first earnings call. We’ll have to wait and see if the social giant has any input as to the status of the acquisition.
http://allthingsd.com/20120726/show...instagram-hits-80-million-users/?mod=atdtweet
